Watch a Koenigsegg One:1 race a Volvo semi truck

Don't bring a semi to a hypercar fight.

British gearhead TV personality Tiff Needell has participated in some oddball races in his career. This one is an absolute head-scratcher: Needell behind the wheel of a Volvo FH big rig, lining up against Koenigsegg's Bugatti-beating One:1 hypercar. Wait, what?

Let's just appreciate the astonishing mismatch going on here. The Koenigsegg One:1 is so named for its one-to-one power-to-weight ratio: 1360 horses moving 1360 kilograms, or a small sack of potatoes under 3000 lbs. It also makes a handful more than 1000 lb-ft of torque. There's crazy, there's bug-out insane, and then five miles further down the road there's the Koenigsegg One:1.

Compare that to the Volvo FH tractor, which kicks out a respectable 540 horses and more than 1900 lb-ft. Oh, and it weighs north of 17,000 lbs.

Okay, okay, this is basically a cleverly-dressed commercial for Volvo's new FH trucks, the first to offer a dual-clutch transmission. "It's just like the gearbox in the Koenigsegg," the video implores you to believe. For the first four minutes of the video, Tiff goes on extravagantly about how the new gearbox allows seamless shifting and no-drama hill starts. It's exactly the sort of glowing praise you'd expect to hear from a guy doing an informercial with a Volvo press pro riding shotgun.

Skip ahead to 4:30, though, and you'll have cleared most of the infomercial pitch to get to the best part of the video–seeing Koenigsegg's fire-breathing hypercar absolutely destroy the racetrack while Tiff trundles along in his lorry.

The result? Just as predicted, the Volvo big-rig is exactly half as fast around the track as the Koenigsegg One:1. It's almost like they planned it that way, you'll no doubt grumble. Sure. Just like Volvo's Jean-Claude Van Damme tractor trailer split video from last fall, this is a clever publicity stunt designed to show off Volvo's heavy-duty trucks. That doesn't make it any less fun to watch–particularly because here, the party piece is a 1360-horsepower hypercar, not Jean-Claude's groin.

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